What opportunities are there post covid19 to redevelop food systems
Answers
Answer:
The pandemic has laid bare the weaknesses in our global food system.
We must take this opportunity to rethink the way we produce, distribute and eat food in order to help build a healthier and more sustainable world.
Here are three actions to kickstart the change process.
The COVID-19 crisis is a ‘stress test’ for our global food systems – and they are failing. Today we see farmers dumping milk and ploughing crops back into their fields, even as stores empty and the need for food assistance surges. We see export restrictions and price hikes as experts predict dramatic increases in malnutrition globally. These failures demand that we ask not only how to repair this damage, but how to fundamentally reimagine food systems to make them more nourishing, resilient and sustainable.
For decades, thinking and strategies around food have developed in silos, with little coordination between communities working on nutrition, agriculture, food, environment, water, health, climate, employment, trade or transport. This has generated serious problems – from policies that provide cheap calories but lead to high rates of diet-related diseases, to market innovations that prioritize efficiency above all and production systems that contribute to climate change and biodiversity loss.
Explanation:
The pandemic has shown that sectors that seem distinct do not operate independently. Though still being investigated, COVID-19 likely originated in wild animals sold in open food markets. The virus easily jumped to humans because farmers had cleared and settled large areas of natural habitat, increasing interactions of wildlife with people, including as food. Sanitary standards at markets were poorly regulated, while rapid transport between densely populated cities spread the virus globally. Now whether infected people become seriously ill or die depends on their underlying health and nutrition, as well as their access to healthcare, sanitation and adequate housing. Indeed, COVID-19 is a story of multiple systems impacting each other, triggering a host of unintended consequences impossible to understand, let alone manage, without looking at them together.
Reimagining and re-designing our food systems
Understanding the connections between these seemingly distinct domains is crucial to emerge stronger from the pandemic. Systems thinking – a way of understanding how interdependent structures interact in a dynamic system – can help.
Taking a systems view allows us to tackle complex questions, such as: How can food systems help eliminate diet-related disease? How can we ensure abundant harvests while sustaining natural habitats and healthy ecosystems? How can farmers adapt to and help fight climate change? How can marginalized consumers, workers and producers be empowered? How can we reduce vulnerabilities to future shocks?
Next year, world leaders and experts will convene for the Food Systems Summit of 2021, called for by the United Nations Secretary General, to articulate and adopt an actionable, integrated plan for food systems transformation. Looking ahead to the summit, we need to bring siloed communities together to redesign how we produce, process, distribute, regulate, legislate, research, cook and eat food.
This is ambitious, but we must be bold and think big. Drawing on systems thinking, we propose three initial actions to reimagine and redesign our food systems:
Hope this will help you.....
AIDS arose though human contact with chimpanzees, probably when hunters targeted them for food. Ebola has also been linked to the wild animal meat trade, emerging in humans from an infection reservoir in bats. Nipah virus originated in the tropical forests of Malaysia in fruit bats, whose natural habitat had been destroyed by deforestation. Regardless of their source, these disease events are our collective responsibility.
Coronavirus is the global pandemic currently gripping the world. A novel viral disease first diagnosed in the city of Wuhan in China, it was traced back to a cluster of patients following their visits to a seafood and wet animal wholesale market. Genomic sequence analysis indicated that the virus probably spread to humans from bats via other wildlife species.
The close confinement of animals of different species creates the ideal conditions for existing viruses to form novel strains and jump between hosts. This pattern of transmission is reminiscent of related diseases, like SARS-CoV, associated with bats and civet cats, and MERS-CoV, transmitted by bats via dromedary camels. These conditions are created in different guises in many settings across the world.
Failing to protect wild spaces can also increase the risk of spreading existing diseases. In the Amazon, an increase in deforestation by four percent can escalate malaria incidence by 48 percent, and the risk of Lyme disease also increases when wildlife reservoirs are depleted by deforestation.
The evidence shows that healthy wildlife populations help protect us from infectious disease. When we interfere with biodiversity and wildlife habitats, we threaten species that each serve a vital role in the ecosystem. As well as buffering the spread of diseases to humans, healthy ecosystems support us by pollinating crops, draining and filtering water, decarbonising the atmosphere, recycling nutrients, forming and maintaining healthy soils, regulating climatic temperatures, suppressing pests, and producing the food, fibre, fuel and energy resources that we depend on. By ceasing the destruction of nature in all its guises, we would be protecting the biodiversity that enriches our shared environment, and also helping the natural world to protect us.